grpc-over-webrtc VS grpcurl

So much time is spent trying to get communication to work between platforms. Maybe WebRTC is the answer to a lot of these problems. Things like https://github.com/jsmouret/grpc-over-webrtc are really promising.

https://github.com/jsmouret/grpc-over-webrtc is another way to get into the browser.

It's nice that you don't have to do any translation. Just gRPC in/out of the browser.

grpcurl

The API server will be built and start running on port 50051. You can test the functionality using a gRPC client of your choice like grpcurl or Postman.

> What is the ubiquitous utility for interacting with gRPC? We have curl for REST. What is openAPI of gRPC?

grpcurl[1] combined with gRPC server reflection[2]. The schema is compiled into the server as an encoded proto which is exposed via server reflection, which grpcurl reads to send correctly encoded requests.

[1] https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl

The whole idea behind the post is that accessing the gRPC service with regular tools is impossible. To test, we need a dedicated tool nonetheless. I found grpcurl. Let's install it and use it to list available services:

gRpcurl is a cool little tool to look at btw. Had to use it at my job before. Can call a gRPC via a curl like command. Regular curl doesn't support HTTP2. Had to use TLS with some tokens even. But you can reference a local .proto(gRPC protobuf file for the call) and make things easier for yourself if you hate reading instructions on command line args like I do.

A simple GRPC client built using grpcurl.

Try testing with grpcurl, using the -H or -rpc-header flags to set the appropriate header.